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Twenty-two miles from Mount Hood’s snowy peak, in an alpine river valley teeming with birds and oscillating light, lives a wild farm. Cows, chickens, and pigs graze among vines, and fungi and flowers proliferate as gardens merge with forest. Our wines are exciting for their wild exuberance when they are young, but they will only reveal their full potential to unite disparate time, place, and experience when stored properly for many years — a minimum of five years, but ideally 8 – 15 years following vintage — in a dark place between 53 – 60 degrees Fahrenheit and at 80 – 85% humidity.
Tzum wines come from small, specific fields, situated between the rainforest and the desert, throughout the Gorge. These parcels embody diverse terrains, vantage points, and climates. Whether single variety or field blend, each planting captures the essence and identity of its environment.
Nate on this wine: “This is from a small parcel of Albarino at the rain forest’s edge, in the coolest part of the gorge. It’s always the last block we harvest. Even in a warm vintage, the wine retains surreal levels of acidity and the aromatics are correspondingly intense. In the very cool 2019 vintage, this quality was taken to absurd extremes. There are certain wines that we learn more from than others. Wines that cause revolutions within our approach in the cellar and vineyard. This is one of those wines. I don’t think most wineries would have picked this parcel. The acid was over 18 grams at harvest; a number way beyond anything we had ever seen or tasted. The transformation over the course of fermentation was nothing short of miraculous. Half of the acid was consumed, a lovely texture emerged and the resulting wine was one of the most stunning from the vintage.”
“The name Eventyr means “adventure” or “folktale” in Danish and Norwegian; the wine writer Christina Rasmussen suggested it on a road trip to Orcas Island in the summer of 2019 and we felt like it suited the place. The drawing is by China of course.”
Grape: Albarino
Vineyard: Eventyr, a small vineyard planted to Albarino on an extinct shield volcano called Underwood Mountain. The site is 7 acres (but only yields about 2-3 tons per year) on the west side of the mountain, in the coldest part of the Gorge with the highest rainfall. The elevation is 1400 feet and it looks south straight down on the Columbia. Farmed organically without tillage (only mowed) and with minimal manipulations to the canopy. “It’s always the last parcel to ripen and the one that benefited most from the absurdly long and glorious summer of 2022. The heat stretched into the last weeks of October and this wine was able to soak up every last bit of it into it’s paradoxical self.”